Before the Consultants Arrive Management consultants are

游客2023-10-20  18

问题                     Before the Consultants Arrive
    Management consultants are advisers hired by a company to help improve overall operations. They do not usually focus on one or two functions within the company they advise. Rather, they aim to see a bigger picture and assess the interrelationship of all. Their arrival presents both great opportunity and great risk.(56)Advance steps taken by the management of the client company play a big role in determining which it will be.
    The greatest value of external consultants is the perspective of a group of informed outsiders. They must be familiar with the basic standards of quality within the client’s field without being immersed in the firm’s internal rivalries, social cliques, or unexamined corporate traditions. One possible trap(57)here would be a lack of true independence, perhaps because of personal or business relationships with someone inside the client company. A consultant who is an old college buddy of the accounting manager is not likely to fairly evaluate the accounting department. Such connections are not hard to screen for, but the screening has to be done thoroughly and out in the open before the consultants even set foot on site.
    Making sure the management consultants are adequately informed is a harder problem. One assumes they have the professional qualifications to do the job, but their specialized knowledge of the firm is only as good as what they discover once they begin(60)their interviews among company employees. If an employee sees the management consultants as a threat, whatever he or she says is unreliable. The team’s questions may be seen as a means of discovering what that particular employee has done wrong. Full frankness, the thinking goes, could cause me to lose some of my privileges, my stature, or(at worst)my job. My solutions: manipulate the truth so I look really good.
    To head off such unhelpful sentiments, any company contracting with management consultants should begin talking up the enterprise at least two months in advance. The message should be, "This is an opportunity, not an investigation. " Convince employees that the outside review is their chance to influence the future direction of the company. Lay out in advance a set of rules for protecting the anonymity(匿名)of employees. Supervisors should not be able to link any individual to any particular point of view unless he or she wants.(58)Since distortions of the truth could also include unfair negative statements about one’s "enemies" within the firm, the system must also protect employees from complaint-bearing colleagues. Most management consultants have calibrated(校准)their data-gathering tools to weed out vengeful(报复的)attacks, but the company should emphasize in advance that the consultants’ report will contain no references to individuals. Furthermore, the consulting team must be reminded to apply a strict standard of evidence, so that no apparent weakness in the company even shows up in the report unless multiple, independent sources point to it. [br] The greatest value of external consultants is the perspective of many______.

选项

答案 informed outsiders

解析 (参见第二段第一句。)
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